Yes. This is why I have devoted a large part of this column to doing precisely this--listening to what he says.

And admirably so. I suppose I should have added "as he preferred to say it." You are tracing what he said and did in his social arc as they touch on the mythic visions that caused significant alterations in those elements. Those are invaluable. He gave the mythic greater prominence in his own understanding. His mythic imagery in the forty-three kami trace his training arc, and either culminate in the visions of the sword and no-sword, or else the visions were later understood and the developments leading to them were explained or systematized in those mythic terms (both are equally plausible). I simply suggest that those would be helpful to lay out in a systematic way, and that there are tools to do that.